Singer/SongWriter Prince Responds To The Passing Of Vanity

BHR Hollywood Reports...........Prince paid a touching tribute to his musical protégé and former girlfriend, Vanity, who passed away earlier this week from kidney failure.

Denise Matthews, better known as Vanity, the protégé of Prince and lead singer of Vanity 6, died on Monday at the age of 57.

During his Piano and a Microphone solo-tour concert in Melbourne, Australia, on Tuesday night, Prince repurposed several of his songs as tributes to his onetime love.

Vanity

"Can I tell you a story about Vanity? Or should I tell you a story about Denise? Her and I used to love each other deeply.

She loved me for the artist I was, I loved her for the artist she was trying to be. She and I would fight. She was very headstrong 'cause she knew she was the finest woman in the world. She never missed an opportunity to tell you that.

Prince explained that he once threatened to throw Vanity into a pool during a fight. "You can't throw me in the pool, you're too little," Vanity responded. After which Prince had a bodyguard

Prince And Vanity

do the dirty work. "I probably shouldn’t be telling this story," he said, "but she’d want us to celebrate her life and not mourn her."

He also changed the lyrics to "The Ladder" to describe his relationship with Vanity, reports the Herald Sun, and replaced the final words of "The Beautiful Ones" from "my knees" to "Denise."

"Her and I used to love each other deeply," Prince said of Vanity later in the show. "She loved me for the artist I was, I loved her for the artist she was trying to be."

In her 1997 book, "Blame It On Vanity," the singer, who was discovered and named by Prince, claimed that he was the only man she ever truly loved.

The two first met at the 1980 American Music Awards, before he asked her to become the lead singer of girl group Vanity 6.

Prince and Vanity famously posed together on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1983.